AppBox Octopress

An AppBox to display Apple Appstore or Google Play Apps to your posts in Octopress or Jekyll

If you prefer the original store buttons from Apple or GooglePlay, have a look at this forked repo

Installation

Add appbox-octopress and nokogiri gem to your Gemfile and run bundle install. open-uri is part of the Ruby Standard Libs.

To install the relevant files type appbox-octopress install in the root directory of your Octopress or Jekyll installation.

Manual installation instructions

• Clone the Git Repository
• Copy appbox.rb from templates/plugins to yourinstallationdir/plugins
• Copy appbox.css from templates/css to yourinstallationdir/source/stylesheets
• Add the following line of HTML code to yourinstallationdir/source/_includes/custom/head.html

<link href="{{ root_url }}/stylesheets/appbox.css" media="screen, projection" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

If your theme and HTML files differ from the standard Octopress theme, modify the include for CSS to your use.

Usage of AppBox Octopress

You can embed the AppBox in your posts with a shortcode:

{% appbox STORENAME APPID %}

If you want to take screenshots of the app in your appbox you have to modify the shortcode:

{% appbox STORENAME screenshots APPID %}

Variables for STORENAME

You can use appstore for Apple AppStore or googleplay for the Google PlayStore

How to get the APPID from Apple Appstore

When you open an url from Apples Appstore like:

https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/tweetbot-for-twitter/id557168941

The ID is the numerical string at the end of the url.

557168941

Make sure that you use it without the string id.

How to get the APPID from Google PlayStore

When you open or search an app on Goole PlayStore like

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twitter.android

the APPID is marked by the label id= in the url.

com.twitter.android

More informations

In my blog I've written the full story of the way writing this plugin. You can check it out at http://sots.name/blog/2013/11/05/appbox-octopress-a-plugin-for-octopress-slash-jekyll-to-display-apps-more-smart-in-your-post/

Special thanks to Marcel Schmilgeit. He wrote an AppBox Plugin for Wordpress based blogs. It was the inspiration for me to write this plugin for Octopress and Jekyll based sites.